


Familiar Stranger

by Neev



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-17 22:56:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2326115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neev/pseuds/Neev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On-Going Winter Soldier AU - Steve Rogers falls from the train and Bucky Barnes is left to carry on in his place.  Upon waking up in the 21st century Bucky wants nothing more than to be left alone, but life never is that simple and some ghosts just wont be laid to rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Human Failings

It is human nature - a failing of human perception - to view the world as static and unchanging. Then there are moments where everything changes so much in a single instant that it becomes impossible to keep telling that lie.

For Bucky this happened in the span of a minute when a Hydra energy weapon blew a hole in the side of a train and Steve Rogers - Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America, the single most important person in Bucky’s life - fell out of that hole and down, down, down till he was lost - forever - in the snow and the ice and the rocks of the Carpathian Mountains.

However, even in these moments of clarity, where change and instability are made unignorable, the essential truth that nothing - nothing - is ever the same as it was before remains obscured. Each minute, each second, adds up to an infinite amount of microscopic changes. Nothing is ever going to be the same as it was before, but the future won't be the same as it is now either.

Bucky’s future holds last, desperate attempts to stop Johann Schmidt from bombing American cities with Tesseract-powered suicide planes. 

It’s what Steve would have done, so Bucky doesn’t think twice about following Schmidt onto the plane. It doesn’t go right, of course, because he isn’t Steve. Sure, he prevents Hydra from launching their bombs but it’s not quite enough, is it? 

There’s still Schmidt and the Tesseract itself, and Schmidt’s megalomaniacal willingness to crash both into New York City, with Bucky along for the ride. 

As far as Bucky can see, there isn’t a future for him past this point, so it’s easy to take that last step. All or nothing. Kill Schmidt, save the city, or die trying.

In the end, it isn’t even him that kills Schmidt, it’s the Tesseract itself that consumes Schmidt in a crackling storm of the energy he was arrogant enough to think he controlled. Bucky isn’t left unscathed by that fire either. It takes his arm, sheering it away from his body at the shoulder so quickly that he has no time to feel pain. One instant he had a left arm, the next he’s watching that arm disintegrate and burn away. 

Nothing ever stays the same.

It’s only the complete consumption of Schmidt’s body that stops the Tesseract’s reaction and saves Bucky from sharing Schmidt’s fate. He gives the cube wide berth as he staggers towards the crippled plane’s controls. The Tesseract’s power left him with a fused stump where his arm used to be. He’s trying not to think about it. Luckily, there’s other, more important things that need his attention anyway. They’re still on a course for New York and Bucky will be damned if he’s gonna let Schmidt manage to put a crater in his own city from beyond the grave. Unfortunately there aren’t really a lot of options for stopping it at this point.

He manages to get the radio to work. Somehow he gets a line to someone, somewhere, and that person turns out to be Peggy Carter. Bucky isn’t sure if he wants to talk to her or not. He’s still not sure whether they’re even friends. There was a bond between them, after Steve died, but it wasn’t friendship. Instead it was a silent, shared understanding of the enormity of the hole Steve’s absence left in both of them. But that doesn’t mean Peggy likes him, so it comes as a shock to him when he realizes that the strange, ragged quality of her voice isn’t distortion from the radio.

His last words are “I’m sorry about everything, Peggy,” and then he kills the line.

The last thing he thinks, as the plane dives into the white oblivion of the arctic, is that Steve wouldn’t have had to crash the plane to save everyone. Steve would have found a way to make it all work. Steve was lost saving Bucky on the train though and Bucky isn’t him. He can’t do the things Steve did and it’s his fault that Steve isn’t here to do them. He tried to carry the shield and he couldn’t.


	2. War Heroes On Ice

On April 14, 2012, the remains of the Valkyrie are found in the arctic. There is no headline announcing this fact, though it does generate quite a lot of classified paperwork in the inner workings of SHIELD.

A team sent to investigate the crash site discover the shield of Captain America and the frozen body of James Buchanan Barnes. 

It isn’t until they start the careful process of thawing his body that they realize Bucky is still alive, although probably no one will be more surprised by that fact than Bucky himself.


	3. Oh! How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning

On April 19, 2012 Bucky Barnes wakes up.

Bucky is vaguely aware that something is happening. It’s warm. He can smell salt. He must be at the beach at Coney Island. He’s wrapped up so snugly in a towel that he can’t move. There’s a moment of panic, but he’s too tired to do anything and the moment passes. He goes to sleep.

No, that’s not right. 

He’s on the boardwalk. There is a radio blaring out the Dodgers game, far too loudly.

No - 

He’s in a bed. The radio is on. The Dodgers are playing - 

His body feels like a TV tuned to a channel that is only static. There’s a ringing in his ears, laid over the sound of the radio, and he wants to move but he can’t. Does he even have arms or legs? He curls the fingers of his right hand slightly and the movement seems to remind the rest of him how to work. Legs bend. Toes flex. The static recedes and he can roll his head left and right on the pillow. Everything seems to be working fine, except the left arm.

It isn’t untill he sits up that he realizes he doesn’t have a left arm anymore.

Something is wrong. The Dodgers are on the radio and he can hear cars outside the window and the room is fresh and spotless and new. Like it was made for him.

The place smells wrong. Hospitals always smell like disinfectant and cleaning solution. Sharp, clean scents trying to cover up the scent of darker things: bodily fluids, excrement, and death. This room smells soft and pleasant. 

He can hear someone in the hallway but her - he knows it’s a woman because he recognizes the click of heels with each step - footsteps sound wrong. They echo too much and there’s no other sounds. No hospital carts with squeaky wheels, no orderlies talking to each other, no voices at all in fact. Just the Dodgers hitting a homerun and the interminable sound of traffic outside. 

A woman enters the room. She is wearing a uniform - Women’s Auxiliary Corps, not nursing - and her lipstick is very red. 

“Where - “ The word comes out cracked and wheezing from a throat that he suddenly realizes is parched and dry. He swallows hard, runs his tongue over his lips and around the inside of his mouth, trying to find a little bit of moisture. “Where am I?”

“In a recovery room in New York - “ begins the woman and Bucky gives a disbelieving snort. She pauses and gives him a confused smile. It’s a very carefully crafted look, the corners of her mouth don’t turn up quite right. Bucky doesn’t smile back.

“Your English is good but you don’t sound like a New Yorker to me. Where am I really?”

His mind is racing and his heart too. There’s a growing tension in the room and he’s just waiting for it to break. How long are they going to keep trying to convince him that he’s safe at home? Memories of the last few months are flooding his mind but they suddenly seem dreamlike and distant. How many of them are drug-induced hallucinations or the fabrication of a mind desperately trying to escape the reality of the body it was trapped in? 

Did Steve - newly transformed into some muscular Adonis - really rescue him from the Hydra base? Did the fight on the train happen? That one felt so real and so close that Bucky could almost believe it. Then he remembers the fight on the Hydra super-plane and that seems so absurd - even if it does explain the loss of his arm - that he knows none of it could possibly be true.

Steve Rogers is a small, sickly man who is, thankfully, still safe in New York. Where Bucky is most certainly not.

He can’t imagine what the purpose of this elaborate ruse is but it doesn’t matter because they’ve made one mistake: they left him untied.

He surges upward from the bed and for a moment adrenaline and fear give strength to his sluggish limbs. Even so, his movements feel like he’s trying to control a puppet. Everything is distant and sensations are muted, like he’s feeling them through a thick layer of fabric. Instead of a well aimed strike, his attack is a graceless tackle. His hand goes for her throat and she slaps it aside with a strength that catches him off guard. He can’t tell if he is weaker than he realized, or she stronger, but the force of her slap sends him stumbling sideways. The room pitches wildly and he stumbles into the foot of the bed, catching it with his arm as he falls to his knees. He’s almost managed to push himself to his feet when five men in black uniforms swarm into the room.

His biggest mistake, he thinks bitterly, was thinking he ever had a chance of escaping. The thought doesn’t stop him from struggling, but a one-armed man who can barely feel his legs isn’t much of a match for five uniformed goons.

Face down on the linoleum, with his arm - his only arm, which he’s horribly aware of right now because he wants to use the other to push himself up off the floor and he’s so sure he can feel the muscles flexing but there’s nothing there at all - twisted up behind his back. The position is making it hard to breathe but he can’t seem to find the words to say that so he just struggles more. The hands holding him down press harder and he is - 

\- drowning, sinking into the frigid depths of the ocean - 

There is no air in his lungs. His vision is going dark. 

\- strapped to a table in a dark room filled with too-bright lights, all turned on him, the specimen, the experiment, the helpless frog about to be dissected - 

The ringing in his ears is louder than ever. Everything is too loud. The ringing, the grating static roar of the crowd at the stadium, the blaring sound of horns and traffic outside the window are so loud that he wants to scream. He’s on the verge of doing so when he hears the sound of footsteps outside the door again.

Heavy, booted feet, moving with quick, decisive steps. The sound of it says “command” to Bucky. 

The door opens again.

“Gentlemen, this is a 95 year old war veteran. Try to show him a little more respect.” The voice that belongs to the boots speaks command just as loudly as their footsteps. It has the sharp, snapping cadence of a person who expects to be obeyed without question and with great speed. The voice is correct in that assumption because the hands holding Bucky down suddenly become lighter.

“Mr Barnes,” continues the voice. “I understand that you probably woke up on the wrong side of the bed and aren’t quite feeling your best, but if you could stop trying to kill my agents for a minute or two, you and I need to have a little chat.”

Bucky nods, because he’s too tired to do anything else or try to figure out what is happening, and the hands release him. He pushes upwards unsteadily and finds himself helped up by the same hands that pushed him down only seconds ago. Now that he has a moment to look at them, he realizes that their uniforms are unfamiliar. Not American, but not Hydra either. The material is different, and so is the styling. 

His legs feel weak and shaky, but he forces himself to stand on his own. He’s breathing hard and his heart feels ready to burst but he shakes off a hand extended to support him. No way in hell is he going to rely on these people or trust anything they offer him. 

The man in front of him is not what he expected to see at all. A tall black man, dressed in black - obviously an officer, his clothes are leather and soft, sleek fabrics tailored to suit his body. He only has one eye and that single eye carries none of the mirth that was half-suggested by his voice. 

“I’m going to show you something and then we’re going to have a talk,” he announces. 

What he shows Bucky is Times Square. Not the glowing neon Times Square of Bucky’s youth but something even brighter and more gaudy. Billboards covered in moving pictures blink and flash on every side. Images of half-clothed women with tousled hair loom over him with sultry stares and pouting lips while men with super-soldier bodies stare stoically into the distance. There are pedestrians clogging the sidewalks and cars choking the too-narrow streets but they’re not the same cars or the same pedestrians.

Trying to take it all in makes Bucky’s head spin and he can feel himself swaying precariously but can’t do anything to stop it. It’s too much, he doesn’t know what’s happening or where he is and he just wants, more than anything, to lie down, go to sleep, and wake up in a world that makes sense. The man with the eye patch reaches out and catches Bucky’s arm at the elbow, steadying him. His grip is tight, almost painfully so, but Bucky needs the the stability that comes with the strength of that hand.

“You ready to talk now?” asks the man and once again the only thing Bucky can do is nod.


End file.
